Balance

I am guessing that one of the big goals of 4th edition was balance. With so many people making new classes, feats, spells, and so on and with the marketing model based on that, it became very difficult to maintain balance in third edition. So much so in fact that the Paizo 3.75 greatly enhanced the base class to keep up with all these new super classes that were out there. With 4th edition classes are much easier to compare.

But why is balance important? In a game like World of Warcraft balance is vital because you have PvP. It is also important because you want to have an even spread of classes and not to overload on one class. These issues DO NOT apply to D&D. The chief issue of balance for a D&D game is one character hogging the spotlight all the time. However, having the spotlight sometimes is fine.

As I noted in my previous post it is easier to balance across multiple encounters than within each encounter. Rogues may eclipse a fighter in damage, but against constructs the fighter eclipses the rogue. Both may do more damage than the archer, but against a flying foe the archer shines. The rogue may be virtually powerless against undead although the cleric may shine in this situation. In 4th edition the goal of making every character useful in every situation and every character having a similar playstyle actually makes the the issue of balance much more important because the more powerful character will most likely be more powerful in every situation.

The approach is balance taken by fourth edition was to make all the classes have the same number of powers. So now when you balance something you can directly compare individual powers. Comparing a 3.5 fighter to a 3.5 mage is hard because their is no way to easily compare them. But comparing two 4.0 powers isn't that difficult. When something that isn't balanced comes up it is more likely to be a specific ability and not a suite of abilities. This seems like a reasonable approach. But it actually makes balance much more important and much harder to do.

If you can make precise comparisons, then one abilitiy is actually going to be better. If you can't make comparisons it is because you can't actually compare. If you can't really compare two things they are so different that one can't be clearly considered better. It is hard to compare mage spells, warrior power attack, and rogue sneak attack because they are all very different and useful in different situations and that is good in my opinion.

Balance in a pen & paper game than a MMORPG because you can balance across the life of the campaign and not on a per encounter basis. A DM is also a live agent that can also tweak things to create more balance. MMORPGs don't have the luxury of having some intelligence come in and modify the world. In a pen & paper game with a DM, if a character is weaker you can place items that will help their particular abilities. If one character dominates the stage you can easily craft a situation where their abilities will take a backstage.

So I think the elimination of playstyle differences in D&D in order to achieve balance and usefulness in all situations for everyone is a flawed idea. Making D&D like a MMORPG because MMORPGs are popular ignores some of the great strengths that D&D has over these games. In my mind a DM is always going to be the true arbitor of balance and the rules will take a backseat.

Of course, it is nice when the rules are fairly balanced and a DM shouldn't have to do major rules modifications to achieve balance. Crap like 'Greenbound Summoning' from the Forgotten Realms rules is obviously broken and should have never been included. But you shouldn't rip apart a game for balance reasons.